Intelligent Traffic Director (“ITD”) is a feature provided on the Nexus series of data center switches available from Cisco Systems, Inc., of San Jose, Calif. ITD provides, among other things, multi-Terabit load balancing at line rate. In order to load balance client network traffic to multiple servers on the backend, it is necessary to provide an IP address to which clients may direct traffic and from there, traffic is directed to one of the backend servers using one of several load balancing algorithms provided by ITD. A virtual IP address (“VIP”) is an IP address assigned to multiple servers that form a device group, in contrast to each server or network interface card (“NIC”) individually being assigned an IP address. Incoming data packets are sent to a VIP address and routed to actual servers at the switch. Single or multiple VIPs can be configured as part of an ITD service. Currently, VIPs are not automatically advertised to upstream routers. Additionally, there is currently no solution to natively host the VIP on an L2/L3 forwarding ASIC.